Warre Beufette / Boondoggle Havas / Trends

He may not be real, but Warre Beufette feels like someone you’ve known forever: opinionated, charismatic, and always ready with a one-liner. Any resemblance to one of the world’s most famous investors? Purely coincidental.

Boondoggle crafted his backstory, tone of voice, and the concept for the campaign. Our job: the technical part. Warre’s face was AI-generated based on extensive prompt engineering and tweaking. His expressions and voice? Those were crafted using a mix of facial motion capture, voice acting, and driver video technology. The result: a great digital character who delivers punchy one-liners with the charm and sass of a seasoned investor.

The tech behind Warre

To make Warre feel real, we used driver videos (recordings of real actors) to animate his AI-generated face. This allowed us to capture subtle, human details: a smirk, a raised eyebrow, a sarcastic chuckle. We first tested the technique with stock footage, just to validate the approach and make sure we could brief our actors effectively.

There are many ways to animate a face, but at the time of production, we decided Runway’s “Act One” feature offered the best quality-to-effort ratio. While the technique doesn’t require deep technical knowledge, achieving the right results took iteration, patience, and a critical eye to get it right.

We deliberately chose to work with professional actors for both video and voice, because quality matters. Especially when you’re delivering jokes that rely on timing and nuance. The voice acting was key to getting Warre’s wittiness across. But here’s where things got tricky: voice acting and animation don’t always sync up as easily as you would like.

Just like with AI generations, with voice clips, you often need multiple takes to get the perfect output. These voice clips then go through post-processing to fine-tune timing, tone, and flow. Normally, that’s no problem. But our animation method (using the driver videos) requires one single, continuous performance, without cuts.

So, we needed some reverse engineering. First, Boondoggle finalized the audio: a voice actor delivers lines. The best take was then polished. When this was done, they brought in a second actor to match that exact performance visually, dubbing the final audio in one seamless take. That video was then used by our team as the driver to animate Warre’s AI-generated face. Yes, working like this may add some extra layers of complexity, but this approach allowed us to hit the emotional and comedic beats with precision. And the result? Worth every extra step.